16.10.07
The eyes and ears of the world

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A British design magazine recently asked me to suggest one of my favourite logos. The Time Warner symbol from the early nineties by Chermayeff & Geismar is my nomination.

It was developed as a visual solution for the merger of Time Inc and Warner Communications, and neatly ties into a desire to be ‘the eyes and ears of the world’. Any decent identity designer will confirm that having a good idea is one thing, but a useful sentence like that supplies fantastic boardroom rationale as you unveil the preferred solution.

The logo itself looks beautifully simple, but study it carefully and you’ll see it’s not really geometric, and actually quite organic. It’s one of those ideas that we’ve all scribbled into our notebooks, only to come quickly unstuck trying to create in real life.

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If my memory isn’t playing tricks on me, I think I remember reading that its designer, Steff Geissbuhler (now of C&G partners) had been struggling to get the curves to work on a computer and ended up painting the solution at home with a set of big fat paintbrushes. Try creating something like this with a standard drawing programme and you’ll soon begin to appreciate how much time Geissbuhler and his team would have spent balancing the weights of the lines which are often technically ‘wrong’ but look visually so right.

As the overall organisation’s mnemonic it was sadly short-lived because a boardroom re-shuffle removed its main supporters and it ended up being shunted over to the cable division. This was justified at the time because ‘the symbol is so strong, it’s hard to make it work with the other symbols’. Quite rightly, the US design fraternity threw up it hands in protest (albeit to no avail). I’ve always thought that was an inherently paradoxical criticism, that a logo could be too strong.

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Thankfully it’s had enough time in the public domain to become a late 20th century classic, and the phrase ‘I wish I’d done that’ doesn’t even begin to cover it for me. If I ever get my eyes to see or hear a solution as good as that I’ll die happy.

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